In Appreciation of the Women Who Do Both

The Provence Journal  ·  Appreciation

She wakes before the house does.

In the quiet that belongs only to her, she brews the coffee, signs the permission slip she forgot to sign last night, makes lunches that won't be traded at school, and stands for a moment at the kitchen window — not thinking, exactly. Just gathering herself.

By eight she is on her way. Not to her own children's school first, no — she dropped them off twenty minutes ago. She is on her way to the classroom where twenty-six other children will look up at her and call her by her last name, and where, for the next seven hours, she will be their teacher. Their referee. Their nurse. Their cheerleader. The one who notices when one of them is unusually quiet, who remembers which mother is going through a divorce and which student has a sick grandmother. The one who, between lessons on long division and the water cycle, holds the emotional weather of an entire room.

And then she goes home and does it again.

"For some women, Mother's Day and Teacher Appreciation Week describe the same person."

Her own children need help with homework. Dinner needs making. Someone fell off the monkey bars at recess and needs a quiet conversation. Someone else needs a permission slip signed by morning. Laundry. Lunch tomorrow. A reading log. A bath. A book before bed.

It is nearly ten before she sits down.

We have a week each May to celebrate teachers, and a Sunday to celebrate mothers. But there is a small, mostly invisible population of women for whom these two designations overlap — women who mother in two languages, in two rooms, for two sets of children. The women who, by the time they are done caring for everyone else, have forgotten what it feels like to be cared for.

This is for them.

"prendre soin de soi — to gather oneself back up. To return to oneself."

In the south of France, in the towns where our soaps are made, there is a phrase: prendre soin de soi. It translates, awkwardly, to "take care of oneself." But the literal meaning is gentler — to gather oneself back up. To return to oneself.

It is what Provence has always understood, perhaps better than the rest of the world: that the small, repeated rituals are not luxuries. They are the architecture of a life that does not collapse. A bath drawn at the end of a long day. The smell of lavender that pulled you, briefly, out of your own exhaustion. The minute you spent rubbing olive oil soap between your hands and noticing — actually noticing — how it felt.

This is the philosophy at the center of our Signature Collection — the soaps we make again and again, the ones our customers return to season after season. Each one a small permission to pause.

The Lavender, for instance — cured for thirty days, infused with essential oils from the flower fields of Grasse, made for the nights when sleep feels far away. The Jasmine, sweet and intoxicating, like a summer evening in the garden. The Lily of the Valley, delicate as spring. The Jojoba, golden and nourishing, made for skin that has carried a long day.

"We don't make soap. We make permission."

This is not self-care as the internet has come to mean it. There is no spa weekend in our message. No product that will fix what is, at its core, simply the cost of caring deeply about other people.

What we mean is something quieter: that the women who give themselves all day, every day, to the children at home and the children in their classrooms deserve, at some point in the day, to be returned to themselves. Even for ten minutes. Even with something as small as a bar of soap that smells like a field in Grasse.

If there is a woman in your life who teaches by day and mothers by night — or who simply does too much for too many people — this is a quiet invitation. Not to celebrate her with fanfare, but to thank her in a way that lets her come back to herself.

A small thing. A handcrafted thing. A thing that asks nothing of her except that she stand in her own kitchen for a moment, water running over her hands, and remember that she is a person too.

That is what we make, in the end. Not soap. Permission.

A note from us — Averal Provence is a women-owned company. We built it because we know, from our own lives, what women carry — and how rarely the world stops to notice. Our work, in the end, is simple: to take the rituals women already have — the bath, the shower, the moment at the sink — and turn them into something quieter, more beautiful, more theirs.

— A Gift for Her —

Essential Care Gift Set Lavender · Jasmine · Lily of the Valley · Jojoba Set of four · $38 Shop the Set →

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Each piece is made by hand in Provence with 72% organic olive oil and essential oils from Grasse. Cured for thirty days. Made the way it has been for centuries.